Artisan already includes ARM's POP pre-optimized physical designs for a variety of its products, like Cortex-A57 and A53 cores and Mali T628 and T678 GPUs. ARM says this partnership will extend POP to "two future advanced ARM Cortex-A processor cores designed for mobile computing applications in either ARM big.LITTLE™ or stand-alone configurations." We can only guess that means the Cortex-A73 and an as-yet-unannounced next-gen small ARM core.

ARM already has a long-running partnership with TSMC to ready its products for that foundry's 10-nm node, and the company says this new partnership gives its customers more choice and a leg up as they ready 10-nm products for the market. We'll have to keep an eye open for custom ARM SoCs fabricated by Intel as that process matures.